7 Jun
1999
7 Jun
'99
3:18 p.m.
Please take a look below.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Monday, June 07, 1999 8:27 PM
Subject: Re: Disk Drive Documents
is
Well, I disagree. The guys who write technical doc's get paid a good deal
because they're good at what they do. Most engineers and programmers,
though they are excellent at what they do, they don't read, write, and spell
very well. That's a stereotype I find very well rooted in reality. Why
would I want engineers and programmers to fiddle with writing and
illustration done by competent professionals? If they want to fiddle with
the context, they can transform the source document in some way into the
format they like and edit the result. They shouldn't be allowed to p*ss on
the work many of us have learned to use with great success. It's imperative
that the documents be clean ( no gratuitous specks, spots, etc, that the
lines in the illustrations be straight where they should be, and curved
uniformly if they should be, and the white space be white, not speckled) and
a precise representation of the document it claims to represent. No
gratuitous cartoons, commentary, etc should be included. Neither should
anything be omitted.
> The problem with PS is that it's not trivial
(or achievable with
freeware)
> to display, scale, search, or selectively print
portions of it, is it?
PDF
allows all
these. True, that's no help if you can't run Acroread.
Remember that Postscript is a full programming language, and thus often
the only way to figure out what a given file will do is to interpret it.
Even the total number of pages printed by a given file is not easy (or
even possible) to determine without running the postscript program that
the file contains.
Ghostscript (at least some versions) is free. That's a complete
postscript interpretter for just about any modern OS that will run
postscript programs and output a number of different formats (mostly
bitmapped images of various types, possibly to drive particular printers
(like PCL, some dot matrix, etc)).
I don't believe postscript is a particularly useful format for something
like this. But I could justify it's more portable than PDF (although you
can do less with it).
> Perhaps not the art of the layout, but the order in which things are
> presented certainly can make the different between a very informative and
> easy-to-use document and one which is impenetrable. That doesn't mean it
True, but...
Very often (in my experience) a given diagram (lets say a schematic)
applies to several areas of text in a document (lets say the circuit
description, the set-up instructions, etc). Often this diagram is printed
in a convenient (for the printer) place in the manual (hopefully near one
of the sections that applies to it). But continually flipping through the
manual to relate the diagram with the text is a pain.
A different point, also to do with layout is : Is it better to provide
text in a platform-specific word processor format (so that the original
fonts and layout is maintained, but some people can't use it) or in plain
ASCII so that everyone can use it, but you won't get the right
fonts/layout all the time. I would argue strongly for the latter (or even
better, some ASCII-based markup language will hopefully allow you to do
both).
> I don't like those minimal-effort-PDF's which look like faxed documents,
> badly aligned with the page boundaries, and looking like poorly rendered
> dot-matrix images either, but I think it's highly important, for the
> confidence of the user if not out of respect for the originator, to put
> forth a creditable presentation of the original document. Making it
barley
readable means
nearly illegible which is nearly worthless. OCR'ing,
I think you're missing the point...
IMHO if you're going to simply provide a number of scanned pages (not
OCRed, not editted at all), then you lose a lot of the benefits that PDF
may have over a simple directory of individual scanned pages (which can
be equally well cleaned up, etc to make them legible). In which case you
might as well go back to providing a directory of scanned images which
can be read on many more types of machine. PDF (may) becomes useful when you have text _as text_,
not as scanned
bitmaps. When you have hotlinks in the document to other sections, etc.
Frankly, I don't know how text is represented in PDF. Some of these
documents have hotlinks, others use a tree at the left of the screen. I'm
not sure why there are multiple ways to do navigate.
For reasons I've already explained, not at all relating to my preference,
though it IS my preference, these doc's will probably turn up in PDF.
Whether they are also hammered into a form some of you like better depends
on whether you're able to come up with a way to build that way and find
someone to do it for you. If it's important to have non-PDF formats
available, and I believe it is, then someone has got to build the non-PDF
documents. Since places hosting such document collections already support
several major formats, I doubt there will a dearth of space for additional
formats. I am convinced, however, that, were I not already in possession of
these documents, I'd get them in PDF, maybe even put them on a CD if there
were enough of them, and use them as I please.
-tony